The Esplanade was close to getting Leonard Cohen to perform at the venue in 2010, says its chief executive Benson Puah.

The arts centre was in serious talks with his agents for him to play here, but the deal fell through as Asia was not on his itinerary then.

Mr Puah, 59, who has been a fan of Cohen's works since the 1970s, saw the singer-songwriter perform at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 2008 and was so struck by the performance that he still keeps the ticket stub as a memento.

"And I never keep ticket stubs," he says. "I was bowled over by how much spirit he had."

Staying in the same hotel as Cohen, Mr Puah saw him every morning at breakfast - the artist would dress in his trademark suit and fedora hat even while having his morning meal.

"That persona never changed, so it's quite deeply embedded in your consciousness."

If Cohen's Singapore show had taken place, Mr Puah would have held it in conjunction with the Singapore Writers Festival.

"I thought it would be wonderful to bring him here not just for a performance because he's greater than that. We could benefit from his worldview, his spirituality that influences his writing and his music," he says.

Indeed, poet and literary critic Gwee Li Sui, 46, says his works are deeply inspired by Cohen: "No one has noted it, but Cohen played a huge role in the growth of my writing. My rhythm is part-his.

"More than a writer and performer of music, he was an unmatched lyricist whose first commitment to language was poetry. He had mature, haunting, almost saintly sensibilities about people and the times and he brought a whole vocabulary to pain."

Singapore Writers Festival director Yeow Kai Chai says: "He encapsulated two of my deepest loves, poetry and music. He presented excellence in both areas, an equal embrace of the profane and existential, from sexuality to religion, always with a twinkle in his eye."

In a review of Cohen's recently released album, You Want It Darker, Mr Yeow, 48, also a music reviewer for The Straits Times, wrote that "it will take a lifetime, and the lifetime after that, to unravel the wisdom that resides within" the songs in the release, the artist's 14th full-length one.

Singer-songwriter and author Kelvin Tan, 52, noted how Cohen's music and lyrics "elevated popular music into the pantheon of true poetic literariness".

"Like Bob Dylan, he was a true visionary who looked beyond the music and raised the art form to the status of true greatness. And he did it with infinite soul and lived it in his long, fruitful life."

Poet Alvin Pang goes further, saying that Dylan's recent Nobel Prize in literature should have gone to Cohen instead.

Pang, 44, who went to Melbourne to watch the late singer perform a few years ago, says that Cohen is "leaving the stage just when the world needs that kind of voice more than ever".

"Everyone's devastated because you've got the United States election and then you've got this, so it's not a good week. A lot of the things he writes about, warns about, the cynicism, the way people are easily manipulated, a lot of that seems to be quite prescient," he says.

"So I don't know what we're going to do without that kind of mind and gentle public voice. It's just a pessimistic time."

Singer-songwriter Alvin Wong, 39, is another fan who made a trip to see the artist in a concert in Hunter Valley, Australia, in 2009.

"Cohen was 75 when we saw him perform. But the energy in his performance and the timelessness of his music led us to believe that there was still more left in his tank. I had planned to catch him live a second time when he resumed touring," says Wong, a magazine writer, who attended the show with his wife.

"For someone who dabbles in music and writes for a living, having encountered Cohen's music and poetry, learning to appreciate both and getting the chance to watch him perform, the songs feel like an immense blessing to me."